


Two Worlds

by suitesamba



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Friendship, Gen, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-07
Updated: 2014-01-07
Packaged: 2018-01-07 22:37:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1125222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suitesamba/pseuds/suitesamba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John makes an unscheduled stop at 221B on the way back from his wedding to check on Sherlock. </p><p>Spoilers for The Empty Hearse and The Sign of Three.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Worlds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [abrae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/abrae/gifts).



> I'm doing the "Snowflake Challenge" on the journals this year and today's challenge was to post a ficlet or other original work. This one's been floating around in my brain since Sunday. It's a short John-centric work, based on a visit John makes to 221B on the way home from the wedding.

“I’ll just be a minute.”

He kisses her on the cheek, and she reaches out to touch his lips with her fingertips.

“Take your time,” she says as she settles back into the seat of the borrowed car. 

He gives her a lopsided smile, warm and sincere, but his face is edged with worry as he glances up at the dark window of the flat, then moves to the door and takes out the key he’s never given up.

It’s too dark inside. Too quiet. Too cold for May. He stumbles at the bottom of the stairs, tripping over shadows and memories, then climbs them slowly, and pauses again to listen.

The tic of a clock. The low hum of the fridge. The quiet drip of the leaky faucet in the loo.

Music is playing, low, nearly inaudible. Melancholic. Mournful.

In the street, far-away, a siren wails.

He doesn’t know what he’ll see when he walks through the door, doesn’t know what he wants to see. 

“Sherlock?”

He speaks in a voice no more than a whisper.

Nothing moves, nothing stirs. 

The sitting room is afloat with a hundred paper swans, converging on a hundred opera houses. They cover furniture and floor. The swans swim in formation. The opera houses form a fortress, a cloned city of sails and shells.

The sofa is empty. The telly is off.

John’s chair is gone.

He stares at the empty space, at the square of clean floor, at the bank of paper swans where his feet used to rest. The dimensions of the room are off. It is as out-of-balance as his life.

His breath hitches.

“Sherlock?”

The music wafts from the bedroom, and John walks there now on tired feet that have danced too long in rented shoes.

He smells cigarette smoke. Faint but fresh.

He stares at a group of swans on the ledge, colorful map segments of London folded into wings and graceful necks. A-Z London will never again be quite so useful.

Sherlock’s door is closed. John pushes it open without knocking.

He blinks, eyes adjusting to the greater darkness.

John’s chair is wedged into a corner. The skull sits atop it, a half-gone cigarette hanging from the jaws. It is sitting within the loop of Sherlock’s wedding cravat, which hangs down over the chair’s back cushion, surprisingly in order. 

John focuses now on the bed where Sherlock lies, curled on his side, back toward the door. The music, something John recognises but cannot name, mourns from the mobile on the bed beside him, muffled by the rumpled sheets. 

He cannot tell if Sherlock is awake. There is no cigarette smoke in the air but the ashtray – John’s favorite teacup– on the bed beside the mobile, is spilling over with butts.

“It’s been an exhausting day,” he tries.

A shoulder shifts, a hand scrabbles mechanically on the bed for the mobile but gives up too soon and relaxes back into sleep.

“Sherlock?”

He steps around to the far side of the bed, but Sherlock is curled in on himself.

John sinks onto his chair. The skull tumbles to the floor. He ignores it, leans forward and picks up the teacup and places it on the bed stand, sighing.

Below, on the street, his bride waits in the borrowed car, as achingly tired as he is, as devastatingly alone.

Caught between two worlds, he stares at his best… _everything_ , listens with physician’s ear to the even, unlaboured breathing, then lays two fingers on the upturned, pale wrist. Counts the heartbeats, measures and weighs them. 

He stands again, reaches for the afghan on the corner of the bed, and spreads it over Sherlock.

He cannot resist a final gesture, and he tucks it down over Sherlock’s shoulder, and then, only then, does he see that Sherlock is holding something, clutching it, cheek pressed against it.

A jumper. Old and worn. The colour of oatmeal. Forgettable and nondescript. Left here god knows when, blood-spattered or torn or stained from a dive in a bin. 

And it is with the resolve of a soldier that he straightens and leaves, and it is with the heart of a man in love that he hesitates at the top of the stairway, poised between two worlds, one foot in each.

~*~

“How was he?” She nestles against him, kisses his shoulder, blinks away sleep.

“Asleep,” he answers. 

“That’s good?” she asks, and he smiles and nods, and relaxes into her as the car pulls away from the curb.

And a thousand shimmering swans with jeweled wings go before them, but as Mary pulls playfully, tiredly, on his cravat, he feels only the wool of that oatmeal-coloured jumper on his neck. And he thinks about their room tonight, the soft bed they’ll soon sink into, and even as he squeezes Mary’s hand and anticipates the promised comfort, there is nowhere he wants to be now more than that chair in Sherlock’s room.

To be there when the morning comes, when Sherlock opens his eyes.

And sees John sitting there. And believes. That nothing has changed. That nothing in the world has changed.

_Fin_


End file.
